New France, Quebec and Kings Daughters
Mayflower and early New England settlers
Irish, Scottish and German

April 6, 2011

Our Great Grandfather Magloire Thibault

I watched the recent episode of "Who Do You Think You Are" with Gwyneth Paltrow. In it she discovers the hard life of her great grandmother that led to her not being a very good mother to her grandfather and his siblings. Her grandmother experienced the death of both her mother and grandfather when she was in college and had to drop out. Later her oldest daughter was killed by a horse carriage at 3 years old. It got me to thinking about all the deaths that Magloire experienced.

At eight years old his mother Emilie died. When he was 16 his stepmother Celine (Miville-Deschenes) died and his father married for the third time. His father died when Magloire was 32, married, and father of five children including a son, Magloire, who died in infancy. In 1903 he lost another son, John, in infancy. In 1919 Magloire lost both his wife Delia and his daughter Laura. In 1947 and in 1948 he lost his daughter Delia Grace and our grandfather his son Joseph John both to heart disease. In 1955 his first grand child, Joseph (BooBoo) Darling died. In 1957 his daughters Lyda and Arlene died. His son-in-law, Arlene's husband, died of a heart attack shortly before Arlene's death.

Magloire died in 1958 a few months after Arlene passed. Magloire had a hard life, yet the one picture we know of him from around 1957 show him to be a happy man. I would have loved to have known him.

What little we do know of him involves great tragedy and heart ache but he was also a family man. Both his brother and brother in law lived with him and his family in Dedham. His first grandchild came to live with him after his daughter Delia Grace remarried. Later, probably after retirement from the railroad, he went to live with Arlene and her husband John Coolidge.